The worldwide gaming market is a multi-billion dollar industry. Statista reports that revenue from video games was estimated at almost $347 billion US in 2022, and the mobile gaming market generated an estimated $248 billion US of that total. While digital games like “Call of Duty” and “The Legend of Zelda” series are commonplace today, that wasn’t always the case. Video games are a relatively recent invention.

The American Physics Society says that in October 1958, physicist William Higinbotham, who was part of the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Instrumentation group, invented what is believed to be the first video game. His game mimicked tennis play and was called “Tennis for Two.”

Higinbotham was not a game designer by trade; he specialized in nuclear arms control. Higinbotham never patented his creation, and it was bought by Sanders Associates. Sanders Associates received the first patent for a video game in 1964. That was eventually bought by the gaming company Magnavox, which began producing video game systems in the early 1970s. The company’s Magnavox Odyssey console was the first ever video game system, says The Computer Museum of America. The Museum of Play cites “Pong” from Atari as the first video game to garner wide attention. Pong arrived in 1972 and first appeared in arcade machines. The home version was introduced in 1975. Much like Higinbotham’s “Tennis for Two” years earlier, Pong was a simple tennis-like game.